Never Gutless

Saturday, May 23, 2009

The 30 Day Game Part 1

Greywulf has been posting a bit about his ideas for a 30 day game, just as i have in the past, so i thought i would start posting up some of what i have so far for my 30 day game.

*****

After the End of the World

Preface:

The challenge was put to me recently whether I could design, prior to the start of the first game, without regard for player classes, number of players, race of the player characters or the relative skill levels of the players involved, a complete campaign that would take the player characters from level 1 to level 30 in 30 play sessions. This isn’t probably a realist or doable task, but I said I’d try and do it so I will try. I will definitely need people’s input however in order to help, so I ask that everyone provide as much input as you are willing to give.

People that need thanked:

A while ago, I posted on the forums that I was trying to do this and several people gave me some advice on how to do it better. Specifically those people are:

GregT 314 who gave a lot of great ideas in very few words, the work of pure brilliance.FastcarfreakKuonjiJimmy 631TreiAtanakarWitchslasherIntoxicated-T-FWhitebaronNoon

Once again, thanks guys. Your ideas helped make this possible.

Rules are made to be Broken

This campaign will break many rules of game play, chiefly those regarding players having a mind of their own and the desire to go on side quests and such (who cares what the player thinks really anyway). It will therefore break several rules all of which are explained below.

Players generally want the ability to go on quests of their own or want to go explore the infinite world that is Dungeons and Dragons.This cannot be allowed as the campaign has to have the entirety of the game already prepared as thirty days doesn’t allow any time for the DM to build anything in between games (the “I have a life too assumption”)

It takes generally between 8 to 10 encounters to gain a level.This will almost surely be cut down at every level, with the exception of perhaps the first few levels which may approach the 8 encounter mark.

Every game session lasts a different amount of time.Well, this is the tricky part. In trying to build a game from start to finish before meeting the players you can’t really know exactly how long each game session might take. In order to actually get each session’s game play done, this will mean that there won’t be a whole lot of story telling if the players aren’t as quick on the uptake. Every day is encounter heavy and each encounter length should be mitigated for time purposes.

Item Availability is usually random to a degree.Screw this, it takes too long and if bad treasure comes up, then kiss all hopes of the player being able to see this campaign to the end goodbye. This game will make use of the “Shop of Unholy Awesomeness”… a shop where the players can buy whatever they dang well please.

Character leveling takes place during game sessions.Screw this, it takes times. Before the campaign starts, everyone agrees what material sources to take gear, items, and powers from and then makes sure that the character is legal… or ideally, the players would all use the character creator which is put out by WotC and therefore the characters are proved to be legal by the character builder and no house rules are used.